[Revised entry by Steven Yalowitz on May 16, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, a-related-views.html, b-related-issues.html, c-laws-of-nature.html, d-mental-anomalism.html, e-mental-causation-supervenience.html] Anomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of psychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation between these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that psychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that thoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity), contradicting the paradigmatic dualist view of...

[Revised entry by Daniel Little on May 14, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of human agency, change, the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the possibility of "learning from history". And it suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned...

[New Entry by Elizabeth Harman on May 14, 2025.] Abortion is the intentional termination of a pregnancy, either via surgery or via the taking of medication. Ordinary people disagree about abortion: many people think abortion is deeply morally wrong, while many others think abortion is morally permissible. Philosophy has much to contribute to this discussion, by distinguishing and clarifying different arguments against abortion, distinguishing and clarifying different responses to those arguments, offering novel arguments against abortion, offering novel defenses of abortion, and...

[Revised entry by Peter Adamson on May 14, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In the ninth century, Plotinus was translated into Arabic. Long sections of this translation went under the title Theology of Aristotle. The attribution of the work to Aristotle helped the text to become an influential source of Neoplatonic ideas in the Arabic-speaking world. But the Arabic Plotinus materials are important not only as a conduit for Plotinus' ideas; they also differ on numerous points from their ultimate source. Thus the Theology, along with other texts derived from the Arabic...

[Revised entry by Peter Adamson on May 14, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (865 - 925 CE, 251 - 313 AH) was one of the greatest figures in the history of medicine in the Islamic tradition, and one of its most controversial philosophers. While we have ample surviving evidence for his medical thought, his philosophical ideas mostly have to be pieced together on the basis of reports found in other authors, who are often hostile to him. This concerns especially his notorious critique of religion, and his teaching that the cosmos is produced through the interaction of five...

[Revised entry by John Palmer on May 12, 2025. Changes to: Bibliography] Zeno of Elea, 5th c. B.C.E. thinker, is known exclusively for propounding a number of ingenious paradoxes. The most famous of these purport to show that motion is impossible by bringing to light apparent or latent contradictions in ordinary assumptions regarding its occurrence. Zeno also argued against the commonsense assumption that there are many things by showing in various ways how it, too, leads to contradiction. We may never know just what led Zeno to develop his famous paradoxes. While it is typically said that he aimed...

[Revised entry by Chrisoula Andreou on May 12, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sometimes a series of choices do not serve one's concerns well even though each choice in the series seems perfectly well suited to serving one's concerns. In such cases, one has a dynamic choice problem. Otherwise put, one has a problem related to the fact that one's choices are spread out over time. There is a growing philosophical literature, which crosses over into psychology and economics, on the obstacles to effective dynamic choice. This literature examines the challenging choice situations and problematic...

[Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on May 12, 2025. Changes to: Bibliography] Smiles, walks, dances, weddings, explosions, hiccups, hand-waves, arrivals and departures, births and deaths, thunder and lightning: the variety of the world seems to lie not only in the assortment of its ordinary citizens - animals, physical objects, social creatures of various kinds - but also in the sort of things that happen to or are performed by them. In contemporary philosophy, this view has been a focus of considerable debate, with implications reaching far into the concern of other disciplines as well, above all linguistics and...

[Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on May 12, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Holes are an interesting case study for ontologists and epistemologists. On the one hand, naive descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference and quantification, on a par with ordinary material objects ('This hole has no lid'; 'That cheese has seven holes'). Moreover, we often appeal to holes to account for causal interactions ('The hole in the roof caused a leak'), or to explain the occurrence of certain events ('The water spilled because the bucket has a...

[Revised entry by Edward Wierenga on May 10, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Omniscience is the property of having complete or maximal knowledge. Along with omnipotence and perfect goodness, it is usually taken to be one of the central divine attributes. One source of the attribution of omniscience to God derives from the numerous biblical passages that ascribe vast knowledge to him. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 14), in his discussion of the knowledge of God, cites such texts as Job 12:13: "With God are wisdom and strength; he has counsel and understanding" and Rom. 11:33:...